With new lease on life, Braintree man gives as much as he gets

Neal Simpson

Saturday

Dec 28, 2013 at 12:01 AMDec 28, 2013 at 12:26 PM

John Morelli of Braintree received a new heart and liver in 2012 at Massachusetts General Hospital. After his success, he and wife Stacey formed the Transplant Foundation of New England which provides some financial support as well as lots of emotional support for patients and their families awaiting transplants.

Lying awake night after night in his hospital bed, John Morelli would often think about the people who shared the hospital floor with him. In the months before his life-saving heart and liver transplant operation last year, a rotating team of friends and relatives visited Morelli daily. They provided home-cooked meals, ferried children to sports practices and held fundraisers to defray mounting medical bills.

It made him think about some of his fellow patients who had no one.

“I had such a great support system,” said Morelli, a Braintree father of three. “There were people in the hospital room next to me who didn’t have that.”

Morelli, now 47, has spent the last 21 months recovering from his transplant surgery. He has also launched the nonprofit foundation that he first fleshed out in pages of notes written in his hospital bed at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The foundation’s fundraising has been modest to date – about $2,000 – but it has already made a difference in the lives of people trapped in the agonizing uncertainty of waiting for a donated organ.

Now largely rehabilitated, Morelli wants to help more people by holding the Transplant Foundation of New England’s first major fundraiser sometime in the coming year.

“Right now we’re helping a single patient here, a single patient there,” he said. “We’d like to help more than that.”

The series of symptoms that led to Morelli’s rare double-transplant in March 2012 actually began more than a decade earlier, when the athletic 29-year-old was training for his latest triathlon. What started as shortness of breath led to pneumonia-like symptoms. Doctors eventually discovered a benign mass in his heart that was sending blood clots into his lungs.

The surgery and medication that followed changed his life, keeping him from the athletic and active lifestyle that had defined him, but it gave him another decade of health. During that time, he married his girlfriend, had three children and bought a house in Braintree.

But long-simmering problems with his heart eventually caught up with him several years ago, when doctors found that his liver was badly damaged too. One day, his cardiologist called him and his wife into a room and said the word they had been fearing: “transplant.”

Morelli spent several months on the transplant floor at Massachusetts General in early 2012 before his doctor told him that a heart and liver had been found. It was, he said, “the most challenging day of my life.

“I was excited. The day had come that I had waited so long for,” he said. “And then it sunk in: ‘Now I have to go through with it.’”

With a wife and three growing boys who depended on him, Morelli had more on the line with this surgery.

“It’s one of those things where I said, ‘No way am I losing this battle,’ and I just dug deep and found ways to stay positive,” he said. “It was the fighter in me.”

After his March 2012 surgery – only the second of its kind ever performed in New England – Morelli woke up unable to walk or talk and spent months in therapy regaining his strength. He still takes more than 20 pills a day, but he says he finally feels like he’s completed his rehabilitation.

And while he has not yet achieved the foundation goals he envisioned while in his hospital bed, Morelli is already helping the people he met on the transplant floor. Last winter, the foundation provided heating oil for a patient who could barely afford to keep the heat on. Last month, it provided money that allowed the family of a New York transplant patient to visit her at the Boston hospital where she has been staying for nine months.

“It was a small amount of money, but it meant a lot for her,” Morelli said. “You try to give them that emotional support, to say that I was in that bed, that I made it through and I’m now living a normal life.”

Neal Simpson may be reached at nesimpson@ledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @NSimpson_Ledger.

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